"Tomorrow is a drag," claims Phillipa Fallon in 1958's High School Confidential. Looker suggests you watch Fallon's wrists. I concur.
Then catch a Full Frame fave I never wrote about —FREE! — courtesy of snagfilms. It's the perfect length to wile away a jitney ride or afternoon thundershower.
Disco and Atomic War tells the story of a strange kind of information war, where a totalitarian regime stands face to face with the heroes of popular culture. Despite a ban on western media, from the 1950s
onward many Estonias were able to easily pick up Finnish radio and television broadcasts from across the border with homemade antennas. Western popular culture had an incomparable role shaping Soviet
children’s worldviews in those days—in ways that now seem slightly odd. Finnish television was a window to the world of capitalism’s pleasures that the authorities could not block.
David Byrne on Lucy Walker's moving, riveting, and ethically iffy at times documentary Waste Land, which the cinetrix also saw at Full Frame this spring but failed to write up.
The Gramacho pickers live by the dump, and every day they converge when the trucks arrive, attacking the mountains of refuse, from every class of Carioca. Various people specialize in certain kinds of recyclable materials — plastic bottles, PVC, and almost anything that can be recycled. These are “harvested” and then assembled in containers for another set of trucks to pay for and pick up and take to the recycling center. ...
To make a long story a little shorter, Vik [Muniz] photographed some of the pickers and then asked them to come to his studio in Rio where they help him assemble their own portraits — made from materials they’ve collected — as Vik directs from above.
[Source]These pieces are then photographed and the original assemblage is destroyed. The resulting giant photographic prints will, in this case, be auctioned, and the proceeds will go to help the community of pickers.
If you look closely you can see the tires, shoes, bottle caps and plastic bottles that make up the shading and lines of the image.
All good so far — but there was an interesting moment that I can’t forget. Vik and Janaina, his soon to be ex, are discussing, in a very emotional way, a dilemma they face. After working in Vik’s studio making art for a couple of weeks, the pickers don’t want to go back to the dump. “How do you send them back to the farm after they’ve seen Paris?,” as the old song goes.
Hal Hartley and Nick Gomez talk influences in the premiere issue of Filmmaker, back in 1992.
HARTLEY: I’m flipping back through my notebook about a month ago in Hamburg. I did 20 interviews that day and had been asked about influences to such an extent that I really got a little upset. So I went home to my hotel room and made a list of "Hal’s real influences" – completely honestly.
GOMEZ: You were drunk.
HARTLEY: Yeah, I was drunk. But, after making eight films in four years — still having to put up with questions…
GOMEZ: About Jarmusch…
HARTLEY: – whose films I largely enjoy. I made a list of all the influences I could remember from the time I was 18 to the present. Here it goes: Robert Fripp and King Crimson; my friend Chris Nicatera who I grew up with; the Yes of Close to the Edge and Fragile – basically early ’70s art rock; the novels of John Gardner and Herman Hesse; David Byrne, especially Talking Heads from 77 to Fear of Music; Eno; Robert Stein, literature professor at SUNY/Purchase; Tom Dunning,* film history teacher; Jim Coleman; the Peter Gabriel of Selling England by the Pound and "Supper’s Ready"; Steven O’Connor, a friend of mine; Woody Allen; Travis Preston, another teacher of mine; Jean-Luc Godard; Victor Hugo; the Beatles; Budweiser; Wim Wenders; Werner Herzog; Murnau’s Nosferatu; Martin Donovan; Almodovar, particularly What Have I Done to Deserve This?; David Bordwell’s book Storyteller about Howard Hawks; the movie Moliere, a French film, I don’t know who made it; Moliere himself; the Poldark saga on PBS, Masterpiece Theater, and the books that that silly series is based on; Adrienne Shelly; Katherine Arnold; my friend Ricky Ludwig; Nick Gomez’s Dear Mom and No Picnic....
I’m more affected by rock music. In music, it’s not so important for a musician to change their character from album to album. In the film business, it’s almost expected. If you make a film that deals with a certain kind of subject matter in a certain way once, if you do it again, you’re fucking up. But your life hasn’t changed that much, your concerns haven’t changed that much, your concerns haven’t changed that much. That’s why I think that music is a much more accurate barometer of a place and time.
*I'm guessing that's a typo, and he means Tom Gunning, who was an associate prof at Purchase at the right time.
